LGBTQ Inclusiveness in the Primary Care Setting

Despite public health efforts in recent years to provide additional care to the LGBTQ community, many health disparities still exist. It is difficult to address these problems due to the lack of organized data being received from health care institutions. Many medical offices have failed to provide a comfortable environment for LGBTQ individuals. This project illustrates a presentation given to staff at a primary care office on how to make the clinical environment more inclusive to LGBTQ individuals in order to provide adequate care.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1382/thumbnail.jp

Target Detection Using Fractal Geometry

The concepts and theory of fractal geometry were applied to the problem of segmenting a 256 x 256 pixel image so that manmade objects could be extracted from natural backgrounds. The two most important measurements necessary to extract these manmade objects were fractal dimension and lacunarity. Provision was made to pass the manmade portion to a lookup table for subsequent identification. A computer program was written to construct cloud backgrounds of fractal dimensions which were allowed to vary between 2.2 and 2.8. Images of three model space targets were combined with these backgrounds to provide a data set for testing the validity of the approach. Once the data set was constructed, computer programs were written to extract estimates of the fractal dimension and lacunarity on 4 x 4 pixel subsets of the image. It was shown that for clouds of fractal dimension 2.7 or less, appropriate thresholding on fractal dimension and lacunarity yielded a 64 x 64 edge-detected image with all or most of the cloud background removed. These images were enhanced by an erosion and dilation to provide the final image passed to the lookup table. While the ultimate goal was to pass the final image to a neural network for identification, this work shows the applicability of fractal geometry to the problems of image segmentation, edge detection and separating a target of interest from a natural background

The Fiscal Revolution and Taxation: The Rise of Compensatory Taxation, 1929-1938

Thorndike explores the Keynesian conversion of Treasury Department tax-policy experts during the 1930s. At the beginning of the Great Depression, he narrates that there was no political interest in using tax cuts to promote economic recovery. In fact, in 1932 Congress responded to the economic emergency by enacting a tax increase in the name of fiscal responsibility. By 1937, however, Treasury experts had become persuaded of the merits of countercyclical taxation. Ironically, the first legislative experiment in Keynesian taxation took the form of a tax increase--the short-lived 1937 tax on undistributed corporate profits, intended to stimulate the economy by discouraging corporations from hoarding cash. He explains the use of income tax cuts as weapons in the countercyclical arsenal requires the existence of a tax imposed on the bulk of the population, and the income tax did not become a mass tax until World War II